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Well… not really a beast in today’s standards… but it’s a beast if we’re talking about processor blades for a 10-blade Supermicro enclosure. Supermicro released its Sandy Bridge Xeons but those are available for a 14-blade enclosure for now.

I wrote a post before about our test bed machine to figure out if SSD is a good route for us. We concluded that it is so we opted to go with the enterprise offerings of Intel, the 710 series.

The Intel 710 SSD is really not inexpensive. I decided to go with RAID 0 of 2 Intel 710 200GB because of 2 reasons: (1) to increase space & (2) to distribute writes for (much) longer write endurance.

Technical specs:

Supermicro SBI-7126T-S6

2 x Intel Xeon X5650

2 x Intel 710 200G SSD (RAID0)

8 x 8 GB DDR3

The X5650 is a 6-core CPU but because of Hyper-threading, it’s registering as 12 cores.

The new blade was deployed as a ganeti node in one of our production clusters. So far, the 2 Xeon X5650s are doing well even with 8 CPU-hungry virtual machines.

I configured the server with growth in mind, thus the 64G memory. We’re not using that much RAM right now but that will change quickly once the ganeti node will host DB servers.

I was planning to perform some benchmarks once we deployed it but I haven’t got the chance… Hopefully, I’ll have the time when the next one arrives. 🙂

We’ve been using KVM Virtualization for almost 2 years now and we’re happy with it. But as the number of hypervisors & VM instances increases, so is the complexity of server management which can be frustrating at times.

I realized that we have to find a way to manage it somehow. I’ve been scouring the net for possible solutions. I’ve read about OpenStack & Eucalyptus but the disparity of deploying VM instances against our current deployment is big that migrating one will be difficult.

I have 6 requirements for the target platform:

cost

centralized management

learning curve / ease of deployment

migration constraints (lesser, the better)

performance / high availability

community support

My boss forwarded me this blog about ganeti a few months ago. I was skeptical to try it at first because deployment was debian-centric. We’re using CentOS so that could be a problem. But after reading the documentation + mailing-lists, I realized that migrating to ganeti will be less painful than other solutions (in theory), so I decided to install a test cluster and ran it for a few weeks.

Testing phase is over and ganeti is promising (drbd + live migration rocks!). Our current cluster has 5 nodes but that will surely change as we go into full production 🙂